Impetuous
by EssaGueraFulo
Summary: Impetuous, imperious, she lets blue eyes flick haughtily at guards whose uniforms remain the same unnerving shade of scab-red. She refuses to let her hand rest on the flask at her side, just as she will refuse to let it rest on her belly in a few months
1. Chapter 1

_Author's note: revamped for clarity. And authorial vanity :) _

_Disclaimer: I do hereby disclaim most thoroughly. Please don't execute me. (Did I ever tell you guys the story about my TCK father mixing up the English words prosecute and execute? It's a good one...)  
_

_In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. The soul is like a wild animal…tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. _

(Parker J. Palmer, _Hidden Wholeness)_

Impetuous, imperious, she lets blue eyes flick haughtily at guards whose uniforms, she notes with disgust, haven't changed from an unnerving shade of scab-red.

As she passes them with dismissive, arrogant strides, she refuses to let her hand rest on the flask at her side, just as she will refuse to let it rest on her belly in a few months' time. Her body language will not betray her. Zuko deserves to know first, before anyone else. Certainly before his guards, who gossip like sailors and know far more than they should about their ruler's history with her.

Luckily the father and daughter walking quietly next to her provide a distraction. Guilt floods through her as she realizes what her thoughts just voiced – in what universe could this situation possibly be lucky? – but with characteristically annoying perceptiveness her partner notices and shifts the sleeping, tearstained little one to his other shoulder to free up the shockingly large hand he lays gently on her arm.

The gentleness is antithetical to his energetic grief, but she doesn't know how to point that out without sounding like an insensitive bitch, so she braces herself for whichever annoyingly wise platitudes decide to burst from his wronged mouth for the tenth time today. They flood out, a string of semantically empty vocalizations: "Quit it. No guilt trips. The only way to get over this is to find the small gains big losses leave behind"

She may be a master at poker-faces – poker-bodies – but her eyes still roll helplessly. "Fatherhood's made you Iroh's little clone. Without the funny. Would you quit pointing out how irrational my guilt is? What's so wrong with a little guilt? I'm human."

She shuts up when the guards go a hint to quiet, their heads determinedly not turning towards her, ears sharpened in sudden hunger for new gossip about the Avatar and his wife. So much for a private life. She breathes deep, and tries to let her irritation at the information vultures leave with the used-up air she exhales.

Forgiving the people who blindly fought for the Fire Lord is more difficult than forgiving Zuko himself, if not as inconceivable as forgiving his life-destroyer of a fa- of a sire.

Zuko's true father, being a true father, is content to pour tea in Ba Sin Se, elegantly treading the fine line between wise mentor and unhealthy co-dependent. Earning a living despite his no-longer-hidden nationality.

Iroh's ability to wheedle forgiveness for himself trumps every one of his countrymen's. She smiles instinctively at the thought, then bites down on her tongue to stop herself from laughing out loud as she pictures the crafty old man's gleeful reaction to finding out that, even in memory, he's amusing enough to destroy her poker face.

Thoughts chase each other through her restless mind, each somewhat related to the last but not necessarily to its predecessor. It's like playing that midwinter game by herself, the one she and Sokka taught to the younger children to distract them from tragedy's shockwaves, so very long ago, when tragedy was childish anguish at the loss of the soft, warm presence of Mother.

Yes, like the winter game, not like the tragedy, just like the game and nothing beyond that. A whispered message passing through a huddled line of ears. Metaphors morphing, within seconds, into a chaotic jumble of wide open mouths howling with laughter at the nonsense the original message turns into.

Laughter, yes. Laughter and elder brothers and earthy, kindhearted greybeards who smell of jasmine and clean sweat. Men who make grief bloom into healthy laughter when it could be festering into anguish.

From flask to Sokka to Iroh. Nearly full-circle.

Enough wandering, she tell her thoughts sternly, proceeding to redirect them to the hall she is now striding through. Ideally, Zuko would have already stripped it of several dynasties' worth of expensive, pointless ornaments, sold to help with the costs of rebuilding the destruction a century of his people's warmongering has wrought on all four nations.

She pictures it. The lack of gold and jade would give this place an echoing, wide-open feel not unlike that of the Air Temple where she re-met him; that bright, wide-open, dusty place out of which he emerged, spiritlike, scraggly hair masking the size of his scar while hard-earned grace saved their ungrateful asses.

No one outside of their little group believes it, but Zuko has always been the resident martyr/scapegoat/sacrificial lamb. It's long past time they make it up to him.

Now she can set the clock back to that moment years ago, in an Earth Kingdom dungeon underground.

A second chance, she hopes. For both of them. For her to forgive, and for him to accept forgiveness. After all, forgiveness has never been her strength, much less her life goal.

The little one next to her has changed that, though. Protectiveness, motherhood – these change one's priorities, one's worldview, more permanently than any sea change.

No sea-change, this, no incoming tide ready to pull back into the ocean within hours. No, this is a shifting of immutable land-masses, of paradigms never before revealed as shiftable, much less shift-worthy.

She arrives in the training room. Mai meets her with a glare that somehow contains compassion, reaches for the little one. "I'll put her to bed," she says, with a jokingly suspicious glance at Katara, gaze sliding towards Zuko before she needles "I booby-trap him in my sleep. Even if you get away from Chaperone here, I'm warning you, one step out of line… my cruel streak doesn't stop at stilettos"

Mai leaves, crooning to the child in her arms in a tone Katara can't reconcile with her sharp, fierce edges. Mai will make a good mother, Katara realizes in horror, not because she's a natural, but because she's learned from Azula's mistakes.

Zuko's chest gleams in the redness that tells them twilight is only minutes away. Winter here means little more than the likelihood of warm rain, so they step into his mother's garden after he awkwardly slides into a yukata. She pushes ahead of him, just in case the blush she feels coming on becomes visible.

She's here for a good reason, she thinks, and this time when her fingers itch to rest on the flask, she lets them go where they will. Lets them stay long enough for him to notice. It doesn't take long. The steady, calm rhythm of his steps behind her falters in less than a minute, but he doesn't say anything. She plays oblivious, so he won't feel guilted into saying anything.

"Dude," Sokka starts, and her heart clenches a little, because it's a lighthearted tone she hasn't heard enough of for the last three months.

He's the one who twisted her arm into coming. She's all for letting sleeping monsters lie dormant, but Sokka's new, grieving self is all for closure, for tying up loose ends while it's still possible to.

"I am soooo not sticking around for this. You'll just end up doing it anyway, and then I'll have Mai on my tail for the rest of my life, and I refuse to make an orphan of that kid."

He laughs when they cringe at the – does he really think of that statement as a joke? "You both really need to learn how to lighten up. Whistle in the dark. Look for the small gains.."

"OK," interrupts a frazzled Fire Lord, "your newfound monkhood is killing me. Go wrestle with the tigers my idiot[U1] wife keeps in the Lotus Courtyard, or plan your next prank on the Minister of Finance."

Katara's glad Zuko agrees with her. She misses the violent outbursts. This new Sokka scares her, more than a little, because she doesn't know how much of this apparent reverence for anything alive is actually becoming ingrained in his thought patterns. If the monster comes back, she wonders, will he be able to protect himself? She dreamed, that first night, of him writing under Its claws, dying over and over again, sacrificing himself first for Suki, then for his daughter, for Katara, for the granny that lived down the road, dying over and over again in place of each villager threatened by the hideous being that burnt pregnant Suki alive, left her charred, large-bellied corpse for Katara's brother to find.

She tries to stop the traitorous thought in its tracks, but it crashes into her like a starving wolf, all teeth and claws, tearing away the fantasies that allow her to go through the motions and revealing the bare, broken bones of what's left behind. He's developed a reverence for any life but his own, and she worries that if he loses the little one, the daughter he has left, he'll axe himself altogether.

Sokka has too much caution around the living, too much recklessness in his body's grief-shaped movements for that caution to extend to his own life.

Please, she begs without words, please go wrestle with the predator cats in the Lotus Courtyard, kill one or two with your newfound sword, a little cathartic killing, a little self-preservation, a return to your old hunter self. Please prove to me that you're not as broken as I can tell you are, under that veneer of healthy grief.


	2. Chapter 2

Ch 2

_Did you know that the gravedigger's still _  
_Gettin' stuck in the machine _  
_Even though it's a whole nuther daydream. _  
_It's another town it's another world, _  
_Where the kids are asleep, where the loans are paid _  
_And the lawns are mowed. _  
_Whad'ya think? _  
_All the gravediggers were gone? _  
_Just cause one song is done _  
_There's always another one_

(Regina Spektor_, Consequence of Sound)_

Zuko and Katara stare together at the broadening, bare-shouldered blue back that recedes from soft twilight into the velvety charcoal darkness inside. Mai should have known better than to expect her brother to chaperone – he hasn't been able to stay away from little Anirik since they lost Suki and the baby, three months ago. Nika – Suki's nickname for the little one- is the only reason he's not a total insomniac. She's also the only reason he still has laugh-lines, the only reason anyone ever glimpses his teeth or his quick wit. And no one understands how unsustainable that is. Everyone except Katara and Zuko seems to make a new pastime of commenting lovingly on how well he's been dealing with this, on how he honors Suki's memory by not letting himself – or his daughter – dwell on revenge.

Aang is thrilled that Sokka now meditates every day, and takes it as a positive sign that father and daughter now avoid meat as if it heralded Suki's so-called tragic demise. Dad goes on at length at how cool-headed, how unselfish, Sokka is showing himself to be in the face of such unimaginable odds. A good leader should never prioritize his pain over that of others', after all. Toph and Ty Lee seem to just be happy that despite the catastrophe he's still a goofball, still alive and kicking and armed with awkwardly witty comebacks.

They all ignore the elephant in the room. Sokka knows as well as Zuko and Katara do that this was no tragic disaster, no attack by ravaging, intent-free beastiality. He doesn't speak of it, but he's always been too bright not to recognize the clear signs of cruel intelligence underlying Suki's death. His pacifism is a ploy, a way of playing dead, of biding his time without endangering his loved ones by exposing them to insider status on his latest master plan. He's choking on intangible bile that no one but Zuko and Katara can sense.

Iroh understands. That's the worst of it, that Iroh – the only one of them who hasn't ruined his own reputation by irrationally pursuing revenge above all else – is encouraging Zuko and Katara to act in accordance with the boy's – when it comes to grief, Sokka will always be a child - ill-formed wishes.

She doesn't care what the old man says, for all his wisdom. She refuses to let her brother self-destruct. That's part of why she's here. She knows what Sokka will ask Zuko for, in time. She needs to beat them both to it.

Zuko turns slowly, shoulders hunching in a helpless gesture. "I don't want to ask why you're here."

"I don't have to tell you right away."

"How's Aang?"

"How do you think?"

"He'll always have some growing-up to do." So diplomatic. She misses his old temper – it excused hers.

"I wish Toph were on my side. When I push him he just pushes right back. Says I'm paranoid."

"Paranoia's saved our lives way too many times. Aang's just in denial – he wants that part of our lives over. He wants the war to be over."

Unjust, that he can see the threads – the chains, rather - connecting current unrest to the war. He couldn't survive if he didn't – he hasn't got Aang's luck or prodigy. Damn Aang for not needing to learn these things.

Because he's never had to, his children will. So will most children of this world he was born to protect.

Zuko has become more perceptive. "Don't give up on him" he half-shouts with his old intensity, and she supposes he could be speaking of either of the most important men in his life.

"I won't," she answers, "but only if you don't let Sokka hunt her."

"Not alone." He promises. "But it's not up to me to let him. You know how clever he is."

"We're clever too. And when it comes to this, he's not thinking straight. I won't let him die. I won't let her take him, too.."

Zuko's eyes cloud over. "If I'd been the son my father wanted, she wouldn't be like this."

The words are torn painfully from his throat. His sister is impossible to love, and nearly impossible to empathize with, and yet his guilt is more tangible than the downy grass they're sitting on.

Katara doesn't interrupt, much as she'd like to. But Zuko doesn't elaborate. Maybe he doesn't need to. It's not so hard to believe that Ozai's love would be more poisonous than his hate. Hate, after all, is entirely honest in its desire to maim.

She doesn't elaborate either, merely uncaps the flask and draws out the water she took from the Oasis on her last visit. Reaches with it for the painful-looking tissue around his eye.

He draws back. "Keep it. She needs it more than I do."

Katara draws it back into the bottle, loss and anger forcing a tremor on her hand.

No matter. Holy water, too, can be used for drowning.


	3. Interlude

The first thing that goes through Sokka's mind when it hits him that the love of his life and the seed of her womb have been maimed and charred beyond recognition is "my second girlfriend turned into the sun."

He hates himself for it, except he can just see Suki laughing heartily and ordering him not to mope. So he gets on with life, feeling only vaguely guilty for relieving his manly needs to memories of her, because he knows the jealous little brat would be absurdly pleased to know that nothing else gets him off. He never gets off to anything but clear memories, though, because the one time he did fantasize about her in a skimpy version of her already sexy warrior garb, she stomped through his dreams and bopped him upside the head and told him to remember her as she was, not as how he wishes she'd been.

Sokka is left as single parent to a 4-year-old, oh joy. He takes many hundred leaves out of his mother's book, and laughs to avoid crying, of course. He's like his mother in that sense, and his mother's favorite song was the one with the chorus "The woman who laughs when she ought to cry and endures more than she lives"

Laughter will be his daughter's constant companion, even if he has to kill himself to produce it. He doesn't have to, though – there is still joy after Suki.

What no one can ever know is that the greatest of these joys is the fantasy of the hunt. The ultimate hunt. His daughter's life will not be ruled by revenge.

It's too late for his own. But no one needs to know that.

The biggest change, really, is that he can't eat roasted meat anymore. He's not sure what the taste would do to him, but the smell makes him toss his cookies every time.


	4. Chapter 3

"A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.

But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know."  
― Barbara Kingsolver, _Animal Dreams _

What a waste. Two perfectly good ransoms turned to hunks of meat. Flames erupt from the tips of Azula's fingers to punish the corpse for its owner's breach of etiquette, startling the physician.

"Please, Highness, I'm almost done removing it."

She squeezes everything but derision out of her voice. "It's not moving. I'd like to see you fix that."

The limp, pale, bloody little parasite taken from the corpse of Kyoshi's fiercest warrior makes Azula's head tingle. She shakes her head and raises her hand to its customarily disguisable position by her left temple, blocking Li and Lo while appearing to simply be preparing itself to brush her hair back behind her ears. Her hair is severely pulled away from her face as usual, not a strand out of place, but pretending to brush it back is an excusable habit – "Tic," Li interrupts gently. "Weakness," Lo snorts.

Azula's hand silently answers them both by spasming minutely, and she ignores their interruption – it is an _excusable_ habit to have after years of being trapped by ignorant caretakers who took it upon themselves to style her hair in a looser fashion... A looser fashion. Looser hair emphasizes the not-quite-angularity of her features, she thinks vaguely, and what has been a tingling nagging takes on the vestments of hunger, of want. A memory begs to be relived, relieved, and Li and Lo alternate between gentle whispers and cackling admonitions that it will burst out of her, like pus from an infected boil, unless she lances it herself.

So she inhales slowly, exhales at precisely 7/5 of the speed of the indrawn breath, and thinks back, trying hard to reign in the wild burst of color and scent and childish thinking that wants to escape to Madness with Azula on its back. She will remember, but she will remember _her_ way. By focusing on the little things, and keeping herself grounded in the Azula she is today.

She thinks back, rationally, calm and collected and herself.

Rounded features.

Rounded features became a concern just as Mother's belly was rounding with a fourth month of pregnancy. This was when Azula realized, to some degree from her mother's childsafe explanation but far more from the clucking of the servants and court ladies who gossiped in her supposedly guileless presence, that the rounded bellies she had noticed on other women were present on anyone who was with child, and that nine months after Fetus was planted, it would claw out screaming. This meant that Fetus would be born very close to the fourth anniversary of Azula's conception.

Fetus' anticipated birth, in turn, meant that Azula's special day – the fourth day in her long life when she would be free of the training and calligraphy and rigid mealtimes and intimidated, suspicious, condescending glances and words that stalked her hungrily from palace to summer home to Grandfather's quarters on every other day of the year – would be taken up by screams and bustling and blood and demands for towels and hot water.

Azula was not happy about this.

But Zuko was.

Azula's brother didn't want to be stuck alone with Azula forever, stuck with the mouthiness and cruelty she couldn't direct at parents or grandfather or court ladies. Everyone's expectations clogged Azula's chest, and though she surpassed them all without a hint of difficulty, bile built up inside her at the implication that she wasn't good enough to have expectations of her own.

Zuko was the only one weak enough to be spewed with the bile without reacting by slapping her, or flouncing off to play with someone else, or telling her that children should be seen and not heard, or ordering her to spend the rest of the day practicing a single kick from a single kata and absolutely nothing else.

No, Zuko just took it all meek as you please, without masking his discomfort or spewing bile back or retaliating in any way. He was weak, but he was the only one who, thus far, had sensed and accepted the crafty monster inside the girly little princess costume that everyone else insisted on dressing her in.

To spite her brilliance, Azula realized only now that he didn't want the Crafty Monster, for all that he tolerated her. No, Zuko wanted Fetus, wanted a sister as innocent and cruelty-free and mediocre as his beloved mother and turtle-ducks.

These were her thoughts on the morning exactly one week before she and Mother were to leave for Summerhouse, where Mother could spend time away from the intense heat and court intrigue that Father insisted Weren't Good For The Baby. Everyone called Fetus "the baby," but Azula knew it was Fetus, a parasite, and this is what she called it in her own mind and with Zuko, who always aimed the same vaguely bewildered, tired glance at her in response, whether she insulted him, Fetus, or Mother.

Father wanted Zuko to stay, to practice advanced katas and study the political science and calligraphy that Azula could learn and produce while hobbled and blindfolded. Zuko always panted, and got sick, and wore a crinkled, lost, lonely expression that made Mother coo over him and Azula want to char him. Father actually threatened to do so, actually aimed flames at Zuko over the facial expression – a royal should never be easy to read – as well as over the clumsiness with which Zuko doused his each and every powerless form, letter, and attempt at political analysis.

Father never quite charred Zuko – the well-aimed flames always missed by a hair. But it didn't take her genius perceptiveness to realize that Father would burn Zuko, someday, and all for what, when Azula was everything Father could want for an heir?

In the courtyard with Mother, Azula realized that her face had crinkled petulantly at these thoughts, though gullible Mother, distracted by something Zuko was babbling about Mei's house, didn't notice any more than she usually did. So Azula smoothed the expression over before being told to do so and directed her attention outward to palace gates and the sky which exploded between them wider and wider and wider until everything was sky and comparatively low roofs, until the gates trailed behind them, too rooted in place to catch up ever again.

Azula could run forever, and the gates would never follow. Would never shut her in again.

But the Palace itself is never behind them, and as Mother waved away the palanquin, Azula tried not to glare at the rows of crimson knees that got in the way of her view of The Outside. She settled for a look of disdainful indifference.

Mei's house, she soon realized, was closer to the palace gates than Grandfather's throne was to the throne room doors, and Azula cast her eyes about angrily, upset at what a joke this trip Outside was. The red knees had thinned out a bit by now and something in a corner caught her eye – a figure in drab cotton clothing stepping with forced casualness from the shade of Mei's wall to the sunlight beyond. His hair gleamed blue-black, brighter than any of the noble silks around him. Like Azula's. She tried not to let her curiosity show as she pivoted her neck to follow his movements. Everyone else's hair, Father's and Mother's and Zuko's, has always shone a dark reddish-gold in the tropical sunlight, but Azula's hasn't - hadn't - a trace of brown or red in it, and it kinked up into waves like the man's unless Mother brushed it out with special oil. The man's features, too, were unusual. His eyes weren't gold at all; they were light brown, like Ty Lee's. But they had green flecks in them, and were more rounded than even Ty Lee's, more like those of the illustrated Earth Kingdom warriors Azula's tutors showed her.

Softly curving eyes with green flecks in them. A half-breed?

Her gaze roved lower over his rounded nose and cheeks and jaw, exploring and categorizing and searching her memory for matches. Gentle roundness like Mother's belly was all she could think of, though a thought she couldn't quite form seemed to be tugging at her mind. Mother's hand tightened slightly around hers, and Azula looked up to see the classic signs of a noble trying to hide something. Mother was less mediocre than the other court ladies, but she was still no genius, and her face had gone a fraction too still, her movements a hint too mechanical.

Mother's eyes studiously avoided the man's eyes.

The man's eyes, which, for the next split second, rested on Mother's face.

Azula forgot, for a moment, to mask her expression, when those green-flecked- eyes roved down slowly, somehow, despite the speed with which he looked away a second later. They inched down in that quick but somehow sluggish way, and alit expressionlessly, for one long milisecond, on Azula's own.

Then his face turned away, and his profile headed towards the mountain where the sun sets, and Azula didn't know if he looked back, because she couldn't afford to look anymore, not in front of so many guards, and certainly not in front of all of the nobles and servants pretending to have just happened upon the royal family.

Azula was extra mean to Zuko that afternoon, her brain furiously coming up with unusually creative ideas even by its already unusually creative standards. She didn't want to think about the man's rounded nose and cheeks and jaw, so like her own, and she paid close attention to Ty Lee's own face, convincing herself that like Ty Lee's, her own roundness is just baby fat.

A week later, before they leave, Father called Azula into his chambers alone for the first time, and dismissed the guards, and gave her a quiet lesson in a kata Zuko had been struggling with for months. Father pretended that He couldn't mask the pride that crossed His angular features when she got it right on her first try.

Then He beckoned her to the old jacaranda cabinet in the corner, and pulled out a little deadwood-smelling vial, and told Azula to do something very special for Him. He trusted her to do it, see, because she's a natural, but He wanted to make sure she's comfortable trusting herself. Was she? Would she trust herself for Him?

Azula steeled her features – now is not the time to show excitement, for the only way to deserve Father's praise is to act as though you're entirely entitled to it – and let out a confident, but quiet and concise, "Yes."

Three days after they arrived at Summerhouse, Azula watched as Mother excused herself before the meal was quite done yet. Later, Azula slipped with Grandmother to Mother's quarters when Grandmother decided to check on her.

They found Mommy curled up by the bed, face rigidly free of grief, eyes wide as her flame-wreathed hands hovered over something in the moonlight. It was a limp, bloody little something, with a disgusting red-coated pale strand of flesh emerging from its middle to disappear under Mommy's robes, and Mommy seemed to be setting it and her own hands afire. But neither burned, and the fire was weird, oddly-colored stuff that reminded Azula of the pictures she's seen of the Sky-Lights of the Northern Wasteland.

Mommy's hands didn't burn, and nether did Fetus, but Fetus didn't wake either, and Mommy was murmuring "it should be working, it should be working" while Grandmama cood sweet nothings – "Hush, child, the baby's at peace now, no healer could develop her enough for survival."

Azula hasn't remembered this at all, except in her maddest, falsest nightmares, ever since the day years later when they were packing up to leave Summerhouse for her cousin's funeral and Mommy found a little deadwood-scented vial under the floorboards in Azula's room.

Refusing to spend another second on the memory of Mother's bewildered anguish, Azula exhales. She wills herself back to the present, where an empty-bellied corpse languishes in front of her and her own soldiers avert their entire bodies from it out of fear of their rightful Fire Lord.

She opens her eyes to find herself with an armful of wailing – living - seven-month fetus, and a flame-wreathed hand smoothing over a slight scar on a dead woman's rounded belly.

She refuses to be shocked into paralysis, quick brain already thinking ahead. This is Reality, and she can manipulate it as easily as she could always manipulate Zuko's pitiful self-esteem. What if…

Her hands move, almost of their own accord, to the dead woman's chest, and she lets the odd flames sink into the cavity of its breast, seek out the misshapen lump of its heart.

The powerful muscle pulses once, twice, and then the flames disappear, and the movement with them.

The heart refuses to animate.

So Azula chars the corpse calmly. She is calm, because she is never furious, not even when she realizes she's been betrayed by her family. She is never furious, only disdainful, and she massages disdain into her twisted facial muscles after the flames have died down and the smell of cooked meat fills the air.

Fury is pointless, but it is also unwarranted. She can still ransom the fetus.


End file.
